Latex displaying C++: error with accentuated characters

Question

I have a Latex document displaying C++ code. The document is saved in UTF-8.

Here is the Latex code:

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern,textcomp}
\usepackage[frenchb]{babel}
\usepackage{listings}
\lstset{
language=C++,
extendedchars=true,
inputencoding=utf8
}
\begin{document}
Voici du code :
\begin{lstlisting}
#include <iostream>

int main() {
   // Affichage des libellés des colonnes
   std::cout << "a b c\n";
}
\end{lstlisting}
\end{document}

Note the accentuated character in the C++ code sample.

When trying to generate the PDF document, I get the following error:

! Missing \endcsname inserted.
<to be read again>
                   \global
l.18     // Affichage des libellés
                                    des colonnes
?

If I remove the accentuated character, the PDF generation works fine.

What's wrong?

Answer 1

Maybe... because of the unescaped \n (which uses a backslash character reserved for delimiting LaTeX commands) in your code.

Answer 2

If I remember correctly, you can’t do that. Even using the inputencoding option only works for characters which don’t use more than a single byte.

As an alternative, use the xelatex processor instead of pdflatex, since XeTeX uses UTF-8 as the internal encoding or use minted instead of listings for source code.